Battle of Greece

The Battle of Greece (6 April-1 June 1941) was a campaign of World War II that involved Nazi Germany and Italy invading Greece, defeating the Greek Army and Commonwealth forces sent to reinforce them. The battle was one of the last successful examples of blitzkrieg warfare, with the Greek capital of Athens being taken exactly three weeks after the fighting had started.

Greece became involved in the war in 1939, after Italian dictator Benito Mussolini's annexation of Albania; the United Kingdom and France pledged themselves to uphold Greek and Romanian independence from the expanding Italian empire. On 27 October 1940, Mussolini decided to mount an ill-advised invasion of Greece, convinced that it would be an easy victory; however, it was too late in the year, and his own generals advised him against it. The ensuing Greco-Italian War saw the Greeks drive back two Italian armies before advancing deep into Albania. The British government offered the Greeks troop and aircraft, but they would only accept five Royal Air Force squadrons and the deployment of a British Army brigade to garrison Crete. The Greeks were cautious about antagonizing Nazi Germany, as Adolf Hitler was turning his eyes toward southeast Europe to secure his southern flank for his planned invasion of the Soviet Union. By November 1940, he had convinced the fascist governments of Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia to join the Tripartite Pact, and he convinced Bulgaria to join the Tripartite Pact on 1 March 1941 after a series of delays by the Bulgarian government that lasted two months. At the same time, the British attempted to create an anti-Axis pact in the Balkans, and Yugoslavia and Turkey refused to see Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, while the Greeks showed new interest in an alliance after the death of the fascist Greek dictator Ioannis Metaxas. The new pro-British government agreed that British troops should be sent to Greece. On 7 March 1941, the Allied W Force, consisting of a New Zealander division, two Australian divisions, and a British armored brigade, landed on the Greek mainland, and the British fleet in the Mediterranean sunk three Italian cruisers and two destroyers at the Battle of Cape Matapan on 28 March 1941 as the Italians attempted to intercept the troop convoys going into Greece.

In April 1941, Hitler quickly defeated and occupied Yugoslavia in a successful blitzkrieg campaign, having originally allied with the government, only to find it overthrown in a coup and replaced by an Allied regime. Hitler also planned for Greece to be attacked at the same time, with German and Italian troops invading from Albania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. The Greek army held the Metaxas Line in eastern Macedonia on the Bulgarian border and the Aliakmon Line along the southern boundary of Macedonia, and the British believed that the Greek armies in Macedonia would withdraw to the Aliakmon Line when the Germans invaded. However, the Greek 2nd Army remained in the Metaxas Line as a result of the Germans' successful invasion of Yugoslavia, and it was outflanked by a German thrust from southeastern Yugoslavia to the port of Salonika. The army was quickly forced to surrender, and a thrust through Monastir forced W Force to withdraw from the Aliakmon Line on 10 April, although the line held itself for another eight days. On 20 April, the Greek 1st Army was trapped in the west of the country and surrendered, another disaster. W Force began to evacuate Greece, with its rearguard holding off the Germans at Thermopylae for five days. On 25 April 1941, German fallschirmjaeger paratroopers seized the port of Corinth, and the Germans entered Athens two days later, with the British evacuation being completed on 28 April. W Force left all of its heavy equipment behind along with 900 dead and 10,000 captured, and the Greek king and his government fled to Crete and from there to Egypt.

The majority of the evacuated British troops withdrew to the island of Crete, planning to use it as a base from which RAF bombers could attack the Romanian oil fields at Ploesti, which were vital to the German war effort. The Royal Navy also used Suda Bay in the north of the island as a forward anchorage, although it was within range of the Luftwaffe in Greece, and there were few Allied aircraft on the island to defend the ships. On 21 April 1941, the German paratrooper commander Kurt Student devised plans to take Crete by an airborne invasion involving two divisions; he believed that only 5,000 Allied troops were on the island, while there were actually 42,000. The German 7th Parachute Division was sent to seize the airfields at Maleme, Rethymo, and Heraklion as well as the harbor of Suda Bay, while the German 5th Mountain Division was to be flown to the secured airfields as reinforcements for the paratroops. The Allied commander, Bernard Freyberg, was convinced that the main assault would come from the sea and not from the air. In addition, the RAF refused to reinforce the 25 obsolete fighters on the island due to German air superiority in Greece. On 13 May 1941, the Luftwaffe began to attack Crete, and the surviving British planes were withdrawn on 19 May 1941, depriving the island of air cover. On 20 May, the German invasion began, but 2,000 paratroops were killed and none of their objectives captured. All of the German commanders, aside from Student, wanted to abort the operation, but Student was determined to see it to a successful conclusion. On the night of 20 May, the garrison of Maleme abandoned the airfield because of misunderstood orders, and the Germans captured it the following day and began to land reinforcements. The British counterattack failed, and the fate of Crete was sealed. The Royal Navy scattered the German seaborne reinforcements, but General Freyberg decided that it was impossible to hold the island, and he began to withdraw his men on 28 April 1941. By 1 June, Crete was in German hands, and the British evacuation fleet had lost three cruisers and six destroyers to Luftwaffe bombing.

With Greece in German hands, the Axis now had complete control over the Balkans. Bulgaria acquired Macedonia and new lands in Greek East Macedonia and Thrace, expanding its empire. German, Italian, and Bulgarian troops occupied the country, and King George II of Greece went into exile in London after the pro-Italian ministers in Egypt rejected him. Greece would remain occupied by the Germans until they abandoned the Balkans in 1944, and they carried out horrific atrocities against the Greeks, including reprisals against civilian populations in response to Greek Resistance activities. Hitler would later blame the failure of Operation Barbarossa on Mussolini's inability to conquer Greece in 1940, as the long campaign in Greece had delayed Barbarossa so that it started in summer and continued into the deadly winter months. Hitler also made the strategic mistake of not taking the British supply base of Malta, which supplied the British troops in North Africa. For all intensive purposes, Hitler had achieved his last complete blitzkrieg success, as his blitzkrieg tactics in the USSR would not successfully subdue the country.